Poster research

We looked at various film posters that had an aspect of our them that we wanted to portray, which was brother relationship. We reserached films that had brothers in them and a development of the brothers a swell as a solution or not if it arised. The brother relationship is a key element in our film as we are displaying a deep change that could either make them or break them. The films that we looked at were: Bloodbrothers, Takers, Boys in the hood and The godfather and the Godfather part II. We felt that these films ahd relation to what our film was about and would possibly have the effect and perception that we want to portray.

Boys N the Hood

Takers

Pre- Production Planning

Addressing the Changes

We had to address the changes that we will be making and what we would be sticking with in order to see what we need to work on and develop in more depth. So we decided to list everything we have and would have and then see what we would be keeping and ditching. So from this we decided we would not need the crystal Palace location anymore because it was irrelevant and we did not need it as much as we thought we did. 

Timeline Planning

This is the Timeline we created

In order to ensure that we stick to the conventions of a short film as well as display our story effectively we produced a storyboard timeline where we were able to note down where key points in the film will be such as the start of the film, the first shot we will see which will be the younger brother praying. On this timeline we also found it easy when and how to raise the tension and when it should go down as well. 

Narrative & Story

We changed the narrative slightly, where by the older brother will be seen as a narrow minded person and sticks to his own teachings and beliefs and doesn't like change that much especially when it comes to religion. he is really against the idea of anyone being of a Islamic faith. The younger brother however is how we portrayed already (the son) and he doesn't tell his older brother about his change in faith and they both get into a dispute where by the older brother challenges the younger brother mentally and makes some statements that the younger brother does not agree with. In the end they come to a conclusion and whether they have resolved the issue or not will be revealed.

Further Knowledge into short Films

To get better understandning of the kind of film we were trying to portray we were shown a short film called: "Lovers Jump". When watching this short film we saw how effective it was and how having limited locations and focussing on the emotion and actual storyline can be displayed without having to go into such deep explanation or long lead up. We was able to get a whole story from just a few sentences from what the characters were saying, even with the long pauses these proved to ectremely effective as it set the modd. the music as well set the mood as well so we as the audience automatically knew that the atmosphere of the film was not a happy one but one with lost and deep emotion.

Lovers Jump

Lovers Jump Trailer

This film also gave us an idea into how we would end our film. Lovers jump had a post credit sting whereby we assumed that the film had finished but there was one short sequence of say about 20s of the man walking away. We decided to have this element ino ur short film to show a falshback from the older brother. This flashback will relate to the start of the film making it all come together and not seem out of place ot left in limbo.

Filming: Solution

Our solution to this problem was to tweak our storyline and script slightly, so instead of presenting a Father-son relationship, we would show the relationship between brothers. We already had a strong knowledge of what we were looking for when it came to the portrayal of the characters. Such films as Dead Man's Shoes.

This film  Showed how brothers are rarely presented as having the same personality types. This concept put us in the right direction, casting wise. We will then be able to cast around our age group from people within our Sixth Form, which will give us the stability we need to shoot. We have also accessed in such films as Brothers, that it is almost a cinema trait to have "brother", not related. This will be able to visually aid our storyline, as we can highlight the cultural clash, if the brothers are foster brothers or one is adopted, bringing in themes of social stigma.

Although we might have been set back location and timing wise, It has been a eye-opener to the world of short films. As they are usually short in only one or two locations, our initial ideas didn't really follow the conventions of one. Now, we will shoot primarily at our Pub location, who signed a filming contract, and perhaps have a flashback to other location and time. This will eliminate any issues of the audience not connecting with the characters. 

We will, of course, have to work harder to show that the other brother has higher status, but this will all be shown through the body codes of our actor and the new script.

Filming Problems

PROBLEMS

Over the last few days we have experienced many problems that have led us to make considerable changes to the idea of how and what we will portray in our film. The problem we encountered was our actors have dropped out of our film and same as our back up actors as well. This proved to be a big halt in filming our film which was due to take place this week as scheduled. We both tried extremely hard to find replacements for both characters in our film but work commitments and school commitments often was a reason for not taking part. With the Father Actor dropping out we lost one of our locations as well and this was a big let down as well as we already struggled to find this particular location alongside with the pub location as well. And so now we are faced with no actors and one location down.

We were faced with the possibility of not having anything to film and so we had to come up with a solution in order to get back on track before anymore time will be wasted.

Presentation: Prodigy Short Film

This is video of our Presentation.

How did it go?

Overall we think that our presentation went well, in relation to sayingthat we felt we highlighted key points within our idea and the portrayla of our film. Although due to actors availability, we were unable to present our final shooting schedule. We were also unable to play our animatic due to it being on lock which was a technical error and so we didnt tend to this problem till after our presentation. We were able to give our audience an overview into the play and what it was focused on.Fortunately, everything else is organised including the weather forecast and sunset times for the next two weeks, this way when the actors tell us their days of availability, we will be able to just slide them into the schedule.

We were both slightly nervous when presenting our final idea, but because we think that our outcome will be strong, we were able to articulate our ideas clearly

Any Improvements?

The things we could improve on in the future is getting to the point much quikcer and also ensuring that we are more organied when presenting our pitch. we do think we could have extended on many aspects of our play such as the animatic and audience research and how it helped us get the idea that we have. We will ensure next time to have the presentations on one slide rather than two separate slideshows as this proved to be a difficult transition.

Presentation Part 1 & 2

We created our Presentations separately. In this we mean that Channan had parts that she would be talking about and Vivienne had parts she would be talking about. Due to time limitations we chose to create our presentations in this way and then combine them both once we have finished each of ours individually. 

Here is Vivienne's:

Prodigy prezi

View more presentations from viviee.

Here is Channan's Presentation:

Prodigy Presentation

View more presentations from Chanz Darlin.

Shooting Schedule

When coming up with locations for the house scene, we found it very differcult as none of the crew had 'boy-like' bedrooms. so to resolve this, we are going to use two houses for Stan and Mitch's house, both mine and one of the actor's, to make it look more authentic.

Saturday 20th November -

2pm

Vivienne's house

Run through of script with actors


Monday 22nd November -


3:45pm


Harvey and Rusell pick up at Streatham Station


4:00pm


White Lion Pub introductions and icebreaker


4:04pm


Sunset
trial run through of pub scene with lighting


Friday 26th November -

3:00pm

Harvey and Russell pick up from Streatham Station

3:15pm

48 minutes before sunset
 Pub scene filming


Saturday 27th November -

2pm reshoot day

120 minutes of sunlight
Pub scene

 Sunday 28th November -

1pm

Crystal palace Stadium scene
light scattered showers


Tuesday 30th November -

5:00pm

outside of Russell's house


Saturday 4th December -

 12pm

Harvey and Russell pick up from Oval Station

12:15pm

Mitch's bedroom (Vivienne's house)


Sunday 5th December -

1pm

Stan and Mitch house scene (Russell's kitchen and bathroom)

Filming on Location Contract

I drew up the contract between us and the Pub managers, as through my secondary research I found that if we didn't have permission, we could create an awkward situation and be escorted off the premises.

There were a couple of disadvantages that we had to take into consideration before finding the perfect pub such as:

• lack of control over the environment- people in the background trying to get in the shot
• finding a real-world location which matches the requirements of the script

As our filming equipment isn't very discreet, and through good practice, we went location scouting although getting permission was very hard to find, but we eventually found a great pub, The White Lion, as pictured, which we through had the best look for what we are trying to achieve.

We were very lucky to escape paying a fee as we have a very small filming crew.

Here is the contract that permits us film on location:

Updates...Location

Location: The Pub & House....

In regards to our location, we mentioned in our presentation that we have yet confirmation on two locations of our choice which was the house and the pub location. We have been fortunate enough to find a house and this will be at our Father figure Actors house. This location proved to be the best out of the possible choices that we had in mind. 


Were still looking for our pub as we are having difficulties getting a pub due to filming times availability. Vivienne will be attending a meeting this afternoon at another pub and Channan will  be contacting the pubs that we had suggestions about.  This is our last location to find and so we will be finding somewhere each actor can get to easily and whereby filming will be with ease and not a hassle to the pub owners. 

Fortunately, We have been able to secure a pub location.

Shot List

As a group we came up with a shot list with broke down the complex story narrative into simple breaks to see how it would plan out.

Weather Forecast

Although we did want to portray London iconography, and we wanted the British audience to identify with our film, we didn't want there to be to much rain as it is that season.  We also didnt want any unexpected weather outbreaks that might put a halt to our filming and progression. The weather could affect the continuity of our film if we were to film in different weather conditions.

So we are planning on filming around the rain showers. In order to do this, we had to get the weather forecast and match them with our actors availability.

Naming Our Film..

We have decided to name our film Prodigy.Coming up with the perfect title is crucial so we deliberated over it for sometime. It had to role off the tongue but have meaning. When considering appropriate titles, we thought about:

• Father and Son
• The Prodigy
• Prodigy

we thought that "Prodigy", touched upon both themes that we will be trying to present in our film as well as simplistic. The definition of Prodigy, (referenced by wikipedia, dictionary.com): an unusually gifted person who excites admiration, religious or spiritual themes are usually connected.

Mitch is the centre of Stan's world, and holds all of his affection. Although not particularly gifted, in the sense of the tangible, he can be seen to have a spiritual gift; as being such a young person yet striving for a difference in his personal and spiritual life. As well as this, the word itself is a noun, so unlike our other options, can be directly linked to our protagonist as a personal name.

Our Short Film Prodigy

This is Our Animatic of our Short Film: 

Prodigy 

.

This is our animatic version of our short film, Prodigy. We made this in order to help us have an idea of final outcome and what would work and what wouldn't.  

Sunrise and Sunset Times

In order to get organized, as we would be filming in the day and the night. We found out the sunset and sunrise times of the next 2 weeks (the time period we are planning to film in). This way, we will be able to know how much time we have to film and be certain on the lighting quality we will have in each scene.

Location...

The locations that we will be looking to film at are:  

• Crystal Palace Stadium (External)
• Local Pub
• A House (Bathroom,Staircase,Kitchen and Bedroom)
• On the Street ( Near Crystal Palace, and Outside Down the Pub)

Crystal Palace

This location will be for our first scene. The football Stadium with our characters will represent that stereotypical Father and Son bond as they are coming home from a football match. This location is also easy to film at as we will be filming on the external of the Stadium. 


Local Pub
(images used are not real images of location they are interpretations)


This Location will be our secondary location and will be in our second scene. Once again the reason for the Pub is to still show that Father and Son relationship of going to the pub for a drink to laugh and converse. It is at this scene where difficulties arise in our film and a little bit of tension arises. 

With this location we have yet to have confirmation on whether filming in these places are allowed. However we do have back locations that we will take on board if finding the Pub Location proves to be difficult to get hold of.


A House
(images used are not real images of location they are interpretations)

The house Location we Have yet to find but we know what we are looking to get out of this location. Hopefully we can use one of our actors houses or a friends house in order to film the scenes required. In the house we will be using many rooms such as the Bathroom,Kitchen, Sitting Room, Bedroom as well as the Stairs.  This location will have more filming done within it as most of the action takes pace within this location. This will also show the emptiness of the house in terms of it just being the Son and Father. 

The Street


We will be filming also on the road nearest to the pub to show how the characters travel from the stadium to the pub. Not much focus will be put on these shots as it will be the Transition as well as passing of time from Crystal Palace to The pub. 

Getting Copyright Music

For our animatics we found a copyright free website to get instrumentals off of for our short film. We sieved through many songs which were saved as individual moods such as: heroic, tension and anger. We chose a couple which we found fit the mood at certain times.

this picture is of the website: http//: audio.lgfl.org.uk

Working on the Animatic

A view of our Animatic in Final Cut express

We uploaded our storyboards into Final Cut Express in order to make our storyboard into a short video.  We did encounter some problems when trying to produce the Animatic such as the files where not opening correctly and saving correctly and so in the end we had to save our animatic on a hard drive. We recorded our script that we produced into Final cut Express. Channan played Mitch the son and Vivienne played Stan the father. When recording our script we matched the script to the images and ensured that we got the timing correct.

Vivienne working on the Sound of the film

When it came to recording we added sound effects that would be heard so that the animatic could seem more real rather than images changing.  We incorporated some good sounds that would be heard in everyday households such as when the father is cooking breakfast we incorporated a frying sound and the footsteps we created as well.  We also added an underlying theme tune that was copyright free. We really targeted on how we was going to set the scene and what music should be added in order to relate to what is happening. 

Channan looking over the animatic

Working on The StoryBoard ( Pre-Storyboard Planning)

Pre StoryBoard Planning

Before we planned our storyboard with images we first completed a pre storyboard sheet where we wrote down all our shots and what would be happening in them. It was here where we made changes and improved our ideas that we had first formed for our Short Film. 

(Storyboard Planning sheets)

StoryBoarding our Short Film Idea

Example of Storyboards we created

The storyboard we created basically was images of how our film would go. We drew images for each shot to portray how we would go about filming it. Each shot highlighted a specific part in that scene.  The storyboard enabled us to see our film in still images before filming it and make and quick changes into how we would film them as well.  When drawing the storyboards we also named them via Scene,Shot and a brief description of that shot. By having our images of our shots it will help us make filming easier as we will know what to film and what emotions should be displayed. This will also help us position our characters and know what they should be doing in each scene. We organised our images in chronological order. Our images were basic still frames that we drew onto post stick notes. 

Scene 4 Shot 28 & Shot 29

We found this process really time consuming because we had repeats of shots and we had to make each shot look effective. Many of the shots we had to re-draw again due to them not looking how the description made them out to be. 

Examples of the storyboard images that we photographed and placed in the Animatic

In total we have 5 Scenes and 43 Shots

Our Actors

For our short film, we thought it would be best to tell our story with minimal characters. This will give the audience time to connect emotionally with the characters, and come to some conclusions by themselves of who can be considered right or wrong. As well as practicality, we will be much more flexible with a small cast. Therefore we will only have two actors, the Father and the son. We will be able to explore each character individually to make way for a high climax, echoed in many dramas and especially short films.

For our father figure we wanted some what of a 'diamond- geezer', but at the same time be identified as a father for our target audience. Much of our secondary research went into finding father figures in not just films, but television shows that achieved that balance. we found that the best actor was Mike Reid. The father also had to have some arrogance about him and 

So we went on a search for someone who could not only be a visual representation of a 'diamond-geezer' like Reid, but achieve this balance on screen. we found Russel Jones:

 He has been in numerous theatrical roles and has the actual life experience of having two teenagers, so we have much raw emotion to play with.

The son would have to be a stereo-typical teenager that had a great bond with his father. The son would mainly relate to many teenage boys of today and with the theme of religion many young teenage boys are converting and so his appearance woulnt need to be altered at all.As we cast the son after Russel, we looked for someone who had similar facial features and after much scouting, we casted Harvey Shadbolt:

He fits our character image and has had much acting experience.

Extract of the Script

 The script is the basis for our film, the dialogue remains between Stan the Father and Mitch the son. The script highlights our main theme that our short film is going to be based on.  This is an extract of our Script:



Example of the Script